I had the same problem. (Incidentally if you’re using AWStats this totally screws with your stats–it showed that I had 20,000 or so hits in a couple minutes).
What worked for me was to delete my wp-admin and wp-includes directories (making backups first!) as well as just about every file from my root directory (I only had my sitemaps and config file left), then re-downloading and re-installing a fresh copy of 2.5.1.
Not mind blowingly clever, but it worked.